Names

[dickens]

I think I first encountered the idea of 'true names' in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Leguin. She is by no means the only author to use the it. It is the powerful and (I thought) nifty notion that everyone has a name (usually received at puberty) that describes exactly who they are; but the name must be hidden lest someone control you with that knowledge.

As a teenager, having shall we say, an rich imagination and a pallid social life, I thought a lot about what my name would be in a world that worked that way. I think that the idea was attractive because identity still felt a bit fluid.

Something I read, I don't recall what (or even if it was fiction or non-fiction) made me re-examine the idea. It no longer seems so shiny. It not only denies change, it denies the possibility of change.

From this side, to say to a teenager 'This is who you are. Forever.' seems more like a curse than a gift. Very GATTACA.

Comments

However...

[ashcake.livejournal.com]

The idea of the True Name(tm) also includes that change. It isn't a snapshot, that's taken at point X to say, "What you are now is what you forever more shall be." Your True Name(r) is the essence of you - you when you're five, when you're seventeen, after you've graduated college, divorced twice, had fourteen grandchildren. It is who you are throughout everything that happens to you, the core of what makes you you no matter how much you change.

It isn't 'This is who you are. Forever.' It's 'You will always be yourself. No matter what happens.'

[omnifarious.livejournal.com]

In Unix there is the concept of an i-node number. An i-node number is like a file's true name. You can move the file around, change it's contents however you like, change it's name, change the permissions, whatever, but it's i-node number will remain the same until it's gone. And once it's gone, the name ceases to have any meaning.

In some ways I sort of see Ursula K. Leguin's vision as being like this.

But I can see your point too.

There is another way to get a name for a file, and that's to take all of its contents and run it through a function that generates a big number that's probabilistically (but not actually) unique for every file. If the file's contents change, then the number changes. That is also sort of like its true name, but it's a much more GATTACA-like true name. And because the Wizard of Earthsea true names are supposed to say something important about who you are, your contents, I can see how they might be like this sort of name as well.